Frank Barros

Building apps for fun and profit | Latest: and | Always be shipping

[Cody Schneider @codyschneider]

i don’t think you understand what is happening in gtm engineering right now

i want to try to explain this to you

what someone can do in a day with claude code + APIs + n8n + railway .com + github repo + skill md files is what a fortune 500 would do in a year

today i made 40 facebook ads

100 landing pages

wrote 3 guest blog posts for backlinks

booked myself on 4 podcasts with a cold email automation

wrote 5 help desk articles

edited two vlog videos

scheduled 25 tweets across accounts

wrote 2 pieces of scripting software to give away as linkedin lead magnets

and baked break from scratch and made katsu sandos with my chief of fiancé

as i write this i still have 4 hours left in my day

i dont think you understand what is happening in gtm engineering right now

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

I love how skills are composable like Lego.

Took 3 Claude skills:
- Social Content
- Canvas Design
- Gemini Asset Generator

Combined them into one Instagram post skill for my app.

Could hook this up to a cron job with the Claude Agent SDK and have it auto-post to Instagram.

Endless content. Hands-free.

This is getting ridiculous.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

Composing skills is harder than it looks.

You can't just mash things together. You need to see the full picture first.

Take an Instagram post. Sounds simple. But it's actually:
- Social strategy (what resonates with your audience)
- Design (layout, typography, visual hierarchy)
- Asset generation (the actual image)

Start with the goal. Then figure out which skills get you there.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

Forgot to mention, but you can definitely use TanStack query with Convex. TanStack start actually has a really good integration of these two, so you get the best of both worlds, and it's all set up for you if you use the boilerplate from the Convex docs

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

After much hand-wringing, I think I'm finally on the Convex train. I'm genuinely going to miss SQL, but Convex just does so much out of the box that it's impossible to ignore. Can't wait to try this out with TanStack Start.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

@tigawanna @tannerlinsley I just started a new project with Convex, and the DX is so lovely

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

Today I made a promo video and an Instagram post for my app without opening a single design tool.

Just Claude skills:
- Remotion for video
- Canvas Design + Social Content + my Gemini Asset Generator for the post

Wild how much this just replaced. Feels like a glimpse of something big.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

I just started playing around with Clawdbot, and I'm now fully obsessed. I made an infographic to summarize what it's all about.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

Okay so using Claude Code for marketing is weirdly addictive.

My approach: look for stuff I can repeat. When I find a process that works, I turn it into a skill so I can just run it again.

Like right now I have 7 skills chained together for blog posts. Generate ideas, research, write the thing, fact check it, then turn it into a LinkedIn post. All from one kickoff.

It's basically automation but for marketing tasks instead of code.

Finding these little loops is the game now. Do the work once, run it forever.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

I think focus might be overrated now?

My December was basically ADHD coding. I'd speak a prompt into Wispr, let Claude Code start working on project A, then immediately jump to project B and do the same thing. Bounce between 3-4 projects in one session.

Old me would've said that's insane. You need deep focus. Context switching kills productivity. Blah blah.

But I shipped 4 apps doing exactly this.

Idk if this is sustainable or if I just got lucky. Sometimes I genuinely lose track of what's happening where. It's messy.

But also... it worked? Still figuring it out.

Anyone else doing something like this or is it just me?

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

Shipped two things last week:

1. Vibe Pets — a pet journal and ai portrait generator on iOS
2. Infographics Maker — a web app for creating infographics from text

Honestly pretty proud of these. Both went from idea to live product while working full-time,
which still feels a bit surreal. Vibe Pets took about a month (it was my first iOS app) and Infographics Maker was about a week to build.

Building in public means actually shipping, and this week I did that twice. Links in bio if you want to check them out.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

I shipped 4 apps in December. A job board, a mobile app and two web apps. Full-time job the whole time.

This would've taken me 6+ months before. No joke.

What changed: I actually got good at working with AI instead of just using it. Claude Code, Wispr Flow for voice prompts, CodeRabbit for reviews, a bunch of custom skills I built for planning stuff out.

It's honestly wild when I think about it. Like a completely different way of working.

The funny part? Building isn't the hard part anymore. Any dev who puts in the time to learn this can ship fast now. The bottleneck moved. Now it's distribution. That's what I'm trying to figure out next.

[Vizlumen @vizlumen]

Claude Code is THE tool of the moment. Here's a concise guide from the creator himself.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

My M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM is 5 years old and I still can't justify replacing it.

Dozens of Chrome tabs. Warp. Multiple Claude Code instances. Cursor. Spotify. All at once. Barely breaks a sweat.

Keep looking at the new ones. Keep closing the tab. Apple really nailed this one.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

Started using Wispr for voice coding last month.

Thought it'd be gimmicky.

Now I can't go back to just typing.

There's something about talking through your code out loud. Makes you think clearer somehow. Also makes it lot easier to code for 7+ hours straight.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

@JonathanRoseD @saltyAom I would love to see a Tanstack example as well

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

@maxedapps Absolutely!

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

This would've been science fiction 5 years ago. Now it's my daily workflow:

🎙️ Wispr Flow — Voice to text, way faster than typing
🤖 Claude Code — Thoughts into Code
⌨️ Cursor — Autocomplete for everything else
🔌 MCP Servers— Gives me extended powers - from talking to databases to web search

This is pretty much Jarvis sans the Iron Man armor.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

TanStack Start is what Next.js should have been.

Simple. Robust. Flexible. The DX is fantastic—landing pages, blogs, web apps, even REST APIs are all easy to build and deploy. First-class TanStack Query integration makes data fetching a breeze. And it's dead-simple to deploy to Cloudflare, Netlify or Vercel.

I'm not going back.

[Frank Barros @brsfrank]

@Davidjpark96 The grit to stick it out that long is inspiring. Congratulations on your hard-earned success!